W A T C H F I R E S

“Hilary Plum’s memoir Watchfires is a tender, twisted, darkly vibrant meditation on the war on terror as autoimmune disease. A quiet work of genius, as hopeful in its punishing honesty as it is rueful in its dire beauty, Watchfires warns, remembers, regrets, recovers. Plum can taste our febrile paranoia and writes it inside out.”Roy Scranton

“Hilary Plum’s Watchfires derives its title from the military practice of lighting a large fire after a battle, to help those lost to locate the group. How apt, given how lost we are. Composed of paragraph pyres, Watchfires illuminates the illness of our bodies and our body politic. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and of the private illnesses that the author and her family have endured, Watchfires poses poignant and essential questions about our age: where does the self begin and end? Who is the other if not my own (other-abled) body? Is terrorism a political act or a cancer? In the tradition of Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and William Stafford, Plum shores these half-fictive, all-true fragments against the ruins of our humanity, lost islands in the age of terrorism and autoimmunity.” Philip Metres

“Hilary Plum is a remarkably natural essayist and Watchfires is teeming with wisdom, depth, and ache. Flitting among a half-dozen topics with organic ease and wonder, Plum’s work is oblique but always precise, personal and utterly controlled—imagine what Virginia Woolf might have written if she’d been intimately familiar with the Boston Marathon bombing, having a partner suffering from cancer, and the forever wars. If there’s any justice in the reading world, this book will be read broadly and passed between admirers for decades to come.” Daniel Torday

Hilary Plum’s Watchfires is an intimate account of public and private life during the long years of the “war on terror.” This remarkable essay begins in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing and illuminates the relationships among cancer, autoimmune disease, the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, Occupy, veteran suicide, the American epidemic of gun violence, and Plum’s family history. The result is an urgent inquiry—philosophical, political, and personal—into the maladies of our age.

*​“Urgent and probing, generous and judicious, Hilary Plum’s Watchfires asks the big questions: what does it mean to be at war, to be sick, to be in love, to be family? This book possesses a beautiful lyricism, a deeply ruminative poeticism, and a steadily building sense of conviction that war and love, disease and health are perhaps more close than might make us comfortable. In this paradoxically expansive and compressed memoir, Plum seeks correspondences between personal pain and public trauma – from chronic illness to terrorism, from the truth-telling of art to the obfuscation of politics. It’s a fascinating and intimate work that can be read as memoir, as essay, as poetry, as history, or as meditation. It is important in terms of craft and also in subject. Compelling, moving, and formally inventive narrative, it is a book that bears rereading.”—GLCA New Writers Award, judges' statement

“Plum takes seemingly disparate narrative threads of caretaking, illness, and terrorism, and weaves them into a work that calls the reader into the emotional landscape of her memories in order to pose the uncomfortable question of one woman’s—and by proxy the reader’s—complicity in a greater system of conflict and violence. ... By drawing the focus inward to the body, Plum forces the reader to see terrorism not as a threat from without, but as a complex moral struggle from within. ... Indeed, her ongoing battle with presumed autoimmune disease—long misdiagnosed—seems to call into question the simplistic good versus evil Manichean framing of the War on Terror. ...

The veterans and victims of the War on Terror still struggle to reconcile with a country that only pays lip service to its service members and holds the consequences of its wars at arms length. Watchfires represents more than a handshake in an airport, or moments of silence at public gatherings, because Plum offers to shoulder the emotional burden with the veterans, the civilians, the victims. The slippage between self and other reaches past borders and battle lines, bringing the malady of global conflict into the heart. If the reader too shoulders that burden—sorrow, rage, and helplessness—then there might be hope for some remission to the violence, some cure to our war.”—Drew Pham, ﻿Consequence﻿

“An excellent book... [A] fragmentary and capacious essay about illness, the War on Terror, and much more. It’s thoughtful, surprising, and self-subverting, and it manages the difficult task of both clarifying and complicating its subjects.”—Nathan Goldman, Lithub

“‘Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life,’ wrote Thoreau, and though Plum’s account is not simple, she seems to have accomplished... what every thinking person might try, according to Thoreau: define honestly and precisely how one’s private life and thoughts relate to the violent spirit of the times.”—Peter Molin, Time Now

“‘Metaphorically speaking, are we now in the age of autoimmune disease?,’ Hilary Plum asks in her evocative, precise, and dexterous new book Watchfires. Plum’s cross-genre book — which combines memoir, fiction, and essay — intertwines the story of her chronic illness... with carefully researched reflections on medicine, marriage, anorexia, suicide, vulnerability, care, suffering, war, and terrorism. By bringing this wide range of sociopolitical issues into contact with her illness, she suggests that although they are not immediately apparent, commonalities begin to emerge when war and cancer, terrorism and autoimmunity, are examined in relation to one-another. Anyone with an interest in healing of all kinds (personal, medical, social, and political) will find much of interest in Watchfires, which makes visible the hidden ways that patient and illness, victim and perpetrator, are constructed in opposition to one-another, despite the ways that they are in fact mutually constitutive. ... Watchfires is a book that will not only lead readers to reflect on the nature of illness, healing, war, and terrorism. Plum also asks us to rethink the material of our language, our narratives, and the methods we use to read ourselves and our world.”—Declan Gould, Full Stop

“[Watchfires] blends public and personal trauma and tragedy to create an unusual and hypnotic essay. Centered on the Boston Marathon bombing, her husband’s cancer, and her own struggles with anorexia and a seemingly undiagnosable illness, Plum investigates despair and destruction. ... [A] book that questions who we are as individuals and how we are connected—or disconnected—from one another.”—Rob Cline, The Gazette (Iowa)

“A narrative that is at once so personal and so universal that [its] insight into the American influence on terrorism feels incredibly new. ... [Plum's] goal here appears clear: to make America into a body, into something tangible to which we are able to relate. ... Plum does an excellent job of turning the political into the personal—and vice versa—while maintaining a distance that feels almost professional in the way of a medical expert. ... [T]o the crowd of Americans carefully tracking our nation’s often-terrifying role in the world—a crowd that has only been growing since the election that occurred not a week after Plum published Watchfires—her book offers a startlingly accessible take on the subject.”—review, Crashtest magazine